See the UFO? No? Try squinting. Squint harder

By Ben Brumfield, CNN

Updated 10:36 PM ET, Fri August 15, 2014

Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

The crew of the space shuttle Atlantis took this picture of the International Space Station after leaving it in July 2011. Atlantis was the last shuttle to visit the station, which was first launched in 1998 and built by a partnership of 16 nations.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

The crew of the space shuttle Endeavour initiates the station's first assembly sequence in 1998. The International Space Station includes several large modules, each launched separately and connected in space by astronauts.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

The Zarya control module, on the left with the solar panels, floats above Earth with its newly attached Unity module after the first assembly sequence in December 1998.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

The first crew of the International Space Station, seen on board in December 2000. From the left are cosmonaut Yuri P. Gidzenko, astronaut William M. Shepherd and cosmonaut Sergei K. Krikalev.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

The Endeavour crew installs the first set of U.S. solar arrays on the station in 2000.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

In March 2001, a space shuttle delivered the station's second crew and brought the first one home. It also brought Leonardo, the station's first Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, to the station. Leonardo carried supplies and equipment.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

In September 2006, the space shuttle Atlantis docked with the space station, delivering solar wings and a new truss.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

The space shuttle Discovery leaves the space station in March 2008 after its crew successfully delivered and installed the Japanese-built Kibo lab.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

The unmanned SpaceX Dragon spacecraft connects to the space station in May 2012. It was the first private spacecraft to successfully reach an orbiting space station.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

An unmanned Russian cargo craft disconnects from the space station in April 2013. The station relies heavily on ships to bring up supplies.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency peers out of the space station's Cupola observatory on April 27. The Cupola is a dome-shaped module that allows station crew members to observe and guide activities outside the station.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft is docked with the space station on May 5. Since the U.S. shuttle program ended in 2011, all crew members are ferried to and from the space station on Russian rockets.

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Notable moments of the International Space Station13 photos

A Soyuz spacecraft is seen on May 13 as it lands in Kazakhstan with Wakata and other members of the his Expedition 39 crew.

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Story highlights

NASA recently deployed live webcams on the International Space Station

They are there to give people a nice view of the Earth

UFO enthusiasts have used the cameras to spot alleged UFOs

They look like specks and blurs

Down on Earth, we all know: Do anything stupid these days, and video of it will turn up on the Internet to embarrass you.

MUST WATCH

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Could this mysterious light be a UFO?

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They've made screen grabs of the NASA video and posted them online. UFOlogist Scott Waring may have been the first, when he plastered them onto his blog, UFO Sightings Daily, early last week.

Highlighted by a red circle and clearly visible is -- a speck. A white one. An enlargement of the screen grab reveals -- a blur.

A note explains the alleged vehicle's shape: "It has a long line down its middle and a dome on its top, but is rectangle on it lower bottom."

If you still don't recognize it, don't worry, it's not called "unidentified" for nothing. And it's hard to know for sure what it is, with all the meteors, satellites and space junk swarming around Earth.

Sleuthing for extraterrestrials was not NASA's intention when it attached the four high-definition cameras to the space station.

They offer live views of Earth's terrestrial greens and browns, atmospheric and oceanic blues, and cloudy swaths of white as the space station races around the planet once every 90 minutes.

And they are a high school science project.

A high-definition camera system streams live video of views of Earth from the International Space Station.

Students designed some of the hardware components in the overall system in a project with NASA called HUNCH, or High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware.

Its aim is to figure out how conditions in space, like high radiation, affect video quality to help decide what kind of cameras to use on future missions.

NASA is separately experimenting with using a laser beam to transfer data to Earth. Researchers hope it will speed up data transfer by 10 to 100 times. The idea is to zap massive amounts of data to scientists, but it could also make for very high-quality video streams.

Aliens on the Internet?

The cameras for the Earth viewing are consumer grade, off the shelf.

But they are apparently good enough to snag alien vessels, which may not have journeyed too terribly far to visit Earth's orbit, according to UFO Sightings Daily.

Trawling NASA images for proof of intergalactic visitors to our solar system has gone on since NASA started snapping the images decades ago.

And the website has page after page of alleged photographic signs of advanced alien life on Mars that it claims happened to turn up in pictures shot by NASA Mars rovers.

They are replete with fossil remains on the red planet and alien bases constructed there, on asteroids, and even on our moon. Though the rovers have found that, at one time, Mars could have supported basic life, NASA has reported nothing on this order.

At least one alleged alien "mother ship" made it into a NASA lunar photo, and you don't even have to squint to see it.

NASA is experimenting with laser beam data transfer to Earth, hoping to increase transfer speeds by 10 to 100 times.

Though it may seem these advanced beings have accomplished much right in our neighborhood, they haven't learned not to fly within eyeshot of a space station the size of a football field (including the end zones).